Does Egypt own the Nile? A battle over precious water

One place to do this stands out. A century ago, British imperial engineers first eyed the Sudd. This is a huge wetland in southern Sudan, stretching for more than 40,000 square kilometres. Its shimmering desert waters are fed by the Nile’s second tributary, the White Nile, which moves very slowly, its water dawdling for up to a year as it makes its way through the myriad channels of the Sudd. This water sustains a major ecosystem in the desert, with thick beds of floating papyrus, thousands of hippos and crocodiles, large herds of elephants, and millions of migratory birds, while also sustaining pastures for the cattle herds of tribes like the Dinka, who live on the fringes of the Sudd. But hydrologists estimate that the White Nile loses half its flow in the process - largely to evaporation.

Engineers developed a plan to a cut a canal to allow the White Nile to bypass the Sudd. Back in 1978, a 2,300-ton canal-digging machine from Pakistan, known as a Bucketwheel, was dismantled and dragged by truck, train, steamer and camel to southern Sudan, where it began cutting the Jonglei canal. Egypt, the sponsor of the project, said that by reducing evaporation in the Sudd, it would deliver an extra 5 cubic kilometres of water downstream - water that it agreed to share with Sudan.

The machine had dug 260 of the planned 360 kilometres of canal by 1984, when the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army, fighting for southern independence from the Muslim north, raided the canal camp and took foreign hostages. War intensified, and no work has been done since. The canal remains a dead end, and the Bucketwheel sits abandoned in the desert.

But peace broke out in southern Sudan in 2005, after the region gained partial autonomy. The president of southern Sudan, Salva Kiir, has held talks with Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak about the prospects of resuming work on the canal, as part of a range of reconstruction projects that Kiir hopes Egypt will undertake in his fledgling country. The final hurdle may be a referendum on full independence for South Sudan, which is due in January.

For politicians, the Jonglei canal is the perfect deal. It will allow more water to be taken from the Nile upstream without reducing how much crosses the border into Egypt. In return for being allowed to dig the canal, Egypt will offer development aid for a new nation.

But the canal would, of course, do huge damage to the Sudd, one of the jewels of African wildlife. The canal would not completely dry up the wetland, according to a study last year by Erwin Lamberts of the University of Twente in the Netherlands. Some water would continue to flow into the swamps in the wet season, and rains would maintain other areas. But at least a quarter of the Sudd and much of its floodplains would be lost. (The wetland is also threatened by oil prospecting. The French company Total is expected to resume drilling in the Sudd this month.)

There is another option - one that has not yet surfaced in political discussions and one that requires a real regional settlement on the future of the Nile.

Engineers have been so concerned about evaporation from the Sudd that they have forgotten about another major loss of water caused by the heat of the desert sun. Behind the High Aswan dam on the Egypt-Sudan border sits the huge Lake Nasser, Egypt’s water bank. But it is an amazingly inefficient bank. Each year, between 10 and 16 cubic kilometres of water evaporates from its surface. That is more than a quarter of the river’s entire flow some years - and around three times what the Jonglei canal might “save”.

The very structure that Egypt uses to control the Nile is also the biggest source of water loss on the river. This is not a new discovery. British imperial engineers always opposed building a giant dam at Aswan precisely for this reason. They wanted a series of dams in the mountains way upstream, probably in the deep ravines of the Blue Nile in Ethiopia, where reservoirs would have a smaller surface area and the evaporative power of the sun would be less fierce.

President Nasser, the father of modern Egypt, could never have countenanced that. He wanted an Egyptian dam on Egyptian soil to capture Egypt’s water. But that grand vision is now breaking down as his upstream neighbours call Egypt’s bluff on the Nile.

It would be expensive, and a major concession for Egypt to allow the main faucet on the river to move to another country - particularly its regional rival, Ethiopia. But the fact is that it would massively add to the amount of water flowing down the Nile.

So, just possibly, a grand settlement of the long dispute over who owns the Nile might create a more sensible solution, with common control of a single regulating dam in a place that makes the most hydrological sense. The shimmering edifice of the High Aswan - monument to hydrological folly - could be dismantled. And then there might be enough water left for nature, as well as for the people of the Nile.